Submitted by: kirkland on Tuesday September 07th, 2004 at 12:06 PM EST

He whipped Indiana Jones into shape and cleaned up Sunset Boulevard. Now John Lowry is the unseen force behind the sparkling new DVD versions of George Lucas' Star Wars films, which arrive Sept. 21 in a four-disc $70 box set.

Over the past four years, Lowry Digital Images has emerged as the pre-eminent destination for studios looking to prepare their classics for DVD. Having cleaned up the Indiana Jones films for last year's DVD package to the satisfaction of Lucas, director Steven Spielberg and studio Paramount, the Burbank-based firm earned the chance this year to do the same for the Star Wars trilogy.

"The most popular movies are often, by far and away, in the worst shape," Lowry says. "They have been printed more often and been duplicated more often, and each of those passes adds scuffs, dirt, scratches and the like."

But Lowry mobilized the forces: 80 employees and 600 networked Power Mac G5 computers with the equivalent of 378 terabytes (378 million megabytes) of hard-disk storage.

The process: First, he analyzes the film and notes its biggest problems, be it dust or softness. Then he sets parameters for the restoration software. The computer system divides the film into segments and applies fixes, identifying flaws by comparing neighboring film frames. Lowry and his team check the processed scenes daily, frame by frame.

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